The Alpha's Rejected Claim

Chapter 3: The Woman in the Alpha's House

The voice carries through two walls and a closed window, which means whoever she is, she isn't trying to be quiet.

Sera hears it before she's fully out of bed — a woman's voice, low and precise, the kind of voice that's learned to make itself heard without raising itself, which is a specific skill that takes years to develop and usually means the person who developed it had good reason to. She can't make out words. Just the rhythm of them, sharp and deliberate, and underneath them, lower, Cain's voice giving back as little as it's receiving.

She tells herself she isn't listening. She makes coffee. The percolator on her stove is older than she is, inherited from her grandmother along with the cabin and the cracked mug she's currently holding, and it makes a sound like a small animal in distress for three full minutes before producing anything drinkable. She listens to that instead. Not to the voices.

The voices stop.

She drinks her coffee standing at the window with her back to the glass, looking at the interior of the cabin — the training mat rolled out in the corner that she never quite rolls back up, the row of boots by the door in descending order of how much mud they have on them, the photograph on the shelf above the stove of her mother at twenty-something, laughing at something outside the frame. She looks at all of it and doesn't look at the Alpha's house across the path and feels the absence of the voices the same way you feel a tooth that's stopped hurting — suspicious, uncertain whether the problem is solved or just resting.

Her door opens without a knock.

She doesn't spill the coffee, which she considers one of her finer achievements.

The woman standing in her doorway is somewhere between forty and sixty in the way that certain women are — the kind of age that's arrived at through doing rather than simply accumulating it, with the bone structure of someone the camera would have loved twenty years ago and the expression of someone who stopped caring about cameras shortly after. She has dark hair going silver at the temples and Cain's eyes, almost exactly, the same particular shade of almost-black that catches light wrong, like water over stone.

"You're smaller than I expected," the woman says. She says it the way you'd note weather — observational, not unkind, not kind either.

Sera puts the mug down on the counter. "Most people are, compared to whatever they're expecting."

The woman steps inside without being invited and looks around the cabin with the focused efficiency of someone cataloging rather than admiring. She smells of cedar and something floral underneath, something expensive enough to be subtle.

"I'm Delara Deveraux," she says. "Cain's mother."

Sera had worked out the eyes. "I know who you are."

"Do you." It isn't a question. She picks up the photograph from the shelf above the stove and looks at it with the same cataloging attention she gave the boots and the training mat, and Sera feels something she refuses to examine move through her chest at the sight of this woman handling her mother's face. "She had good bones. Your mother."

"She did."

"You have them too." She sets the photograph down, not quite where it was. Half an inch to the left, close enough to look accidental. "Cain told me about the bond."

"Then Cain told you he rejected it."

"He did." A pause. Delara crosses to the window and looks out at the Alpha's house from Sera's side of the glass, and Sera watches the back of her head and thinks about what a person looks like from behind when they're deciding how much to give away. "He's made decisions like this before. Quickly. Without consulting anyone. When he was sixteen he left the northern territory for eight months without telling me where he was going. When he was twenty he refused his first Alpha trial and made them re-set the entire process because he said the terms were designed for someone with more to lose than him." A short exhale — almost a laugh, almost something else. "He has always been better at knowing what he doesn't want than asking himself why."

Sera says nothing. The coffee smells burnt. She should have taken it off the heat a minute ago and didn't, and now it'll taste like the bottom of it, thick and dark and slightly wrong.

"I'm not here to apologize for him," Delara says.

"I didn't think you were."

"I'm here because I wanted to see what kind of woman makes my son follow her home in the dark and then stand outside her door for twenty minutes without knocking." She turns. Her eyes in the morning light are the same as his but warmer, or less defended, it's hard to tell which. "He came inside eventually?"

"He didn't knock."

Something moves across Delara's face too fast to catch. "No. He wouldn't." She reaches into the pocket of her coat and sets something on the counter beside the mug. A small object. Stone, roughly oval, dark gray, so smooth it looks wet. "This belonged to the woman who was Beta of this pack before your father took the rank. She left it for the next unmated woman of standing in the pack when she died, because she said the bond she'd been given was the worst thing that ever happened to her and the best thing and she wanted whoever came next to know it was possible to survive both of those being true simultaneously." She moves toward the door. "I'm not telling you to wait for him. I'm not telling you to leave. I'm telling you that my son is carrying something he doesn't have the language for yet, and men who don't have the language for things they're carrying tend to put them down badly." A pause at the threshold, hand on the doorframe, and the morning light from outside makes her look older. "Don't let him put it down on you."

She leaves without closing the door all the way.

Sera stands in the kitchen with the smell of burnt coffee filling the small space and picks up the stone from the counter. It's warm, which doesn't make sense given the temperature of Delara's coat pocket, and it fits in her palm like it was shaped for it, which also doesn't make sense and which she refuses to think about too hard before she's finished the coffee. She closes her fist around it.

Outside, across the path, the Alpha's front door opens.

Cain stands in it for a moment — long enough that she knows he's aware of her window, long enough that the awareness is mutual and acknowledged and neither of them does anything with it — and then he looks away first, down at something in his hand, and she realizes he's holding his phone, reading something, and that the look on his face as he reads it is the same look as last night at the bonfire, the door closing fast over something she can't name.

He goes back inside.

The pack meeting summons lands on her phone two seconds later. Mandatory attendance. Seven AM. The Alpha's hall. She looks at the time. Six forty-three. Her boots are muddy and her coffee is burnt and the stone in her fist is still inexplicably warm and Cain Deveraux just looked at his phone the way people look at things they've been dreading and then went back inside to get ready to face them, and she has seventeen minutes to decide whether she walks into that meeting as the girl the Alpha rejected or as something else entirely.

She drinks the rest of the coffee. Burnt, dark, a little wrong.

It tastes, she decides, like a decision.